i'm thinking of you all the while (I)
by thefudge is grumpy
Summary: Rewrite of 6x22. Bonnie and Kai's confrontation takes a tragic and emotional turn.


_(originally posted on tumblr.)_

* * *

 **i'm thinking of you all the while (I.)**

He's forgotten the pecking order. And she exults in reminding him.

"A leader without a coven is strong…but not that strong," Bonnie states, stepping over the fallen bodies of his family.

Kai grins a bloody, demented grin. His jaws hurt with smiling, but he keeps his face frozen, lest she see anything else. His heart is beating wildly at the sight of her tiny body, in the middle of this feast of corpses. Like a queen come for her king.

"Ooooh, I like to think less is more," he chants, cracking his neck. He raises his arm and Bonnie tilts back from the intensity of his spell, but remains firmly rooted.

"That kind of thinking will get you killed," she spits with a faux-smile. Her fists are clenched and she pulls them at her side. Pieces of driftwood and glass start flying around him and he's drawn to her by her magic, the centerpiece in a vortex of sharp things. She adds an aneurysm too, because a newly-minted vampire should taste the Bennett cure sooner rather than later.

Kai shuts his eyes and presses his hands to his ears, but the pain comes in through his mouth and nostrils. It's so sudden that his body locks down, as if a prison world inside of him were about to founder. He opens one eye. Bonnie fucking Bennett is smirking. And, _goodness_ , he lets himself be drawn.

But he recalls - he recalls it's the same smirk she wore the night she left him in 1903 and he's suddenly sobered up.

He pretends to fall to his knees and collapse on the floor. Bonnie, either startled or curious, stops the spell and the pain recedes.

She takes a step closer to him, arms still raised, but he's faster. New reflexes, never before tried, lead him to the source of his hunger with frightening accuracy. He is behind her in half a second, his fangs hatched, and he is grabbing her waist and sinking his teeth into her throat with a sigh of relief.

Bonnie loses her breath as he pins her to him and tightens his grip on her stomach, nails digging into her flesh with the despair of the blood sucker. He nuzzles his nose against her neck, licking and drinking the black blood with relish. Bonnie moans in surprise, because pain and pleasure are sensations of a distant realm, and all she feels now is an extreme lightness. She grabs his head to pull him away, but he growls and protests and winds himself around her faster, and she's never heard these sounds before.

Slowly, aneurysm by aneurysm, he is unlatched from his honey pot. He staggers back, drunk, elated with her blood, and his arms leave behind a vampiric coldness, that spreads like ice through her veins. Bonnie twists her wrist and the aneurysms come faster, but he grins and whirrs with delight as he holds his head with both hands.

Bonnie presses a hand to her neck. She can heal herself, but it will take some of her magic… and she has an inkling that he's gained some of his own.

"Man, the heretics have it good. Just a gulp of blood and you get refilled with sweet, sweet magic," he says matter-of-factly, looking at his long fingers and feeling the power pool in his hands.

Bonnie scowls. "Don't get used to that feeling, Kai."

He levels her with a brazen look. "Oh, _Bonster_. I plan on drinking you up."

"What about your spell, huh? If you drain me, Elena will wake up and she and Damon will live happily ever after. Don't you want to subject him to a life of misery?" she taunts.

"Not as much as I want you in my arms again," he says, licking his lips hungrily and they both fall silent, because while his meaning couldn't be clearer, his eyes shift traitorously. Their shared history doesn't allow for such heated words without…implications.

"I don't believe you," she says at length. "You won't kill me. You need me for this plan to work. It's the one weakness you didn't account for. Meanwhile…I can kill you _just fine_."

Kai's smile melts into a terrifying grimace. "You clever little minx. Think you have it all figured out, huh?"

His power surges with the newly consumed blood and he feels stronger than ever, capable of killing her and bringing her back from the dead.

When he raises his arm, she gasps because she is raised up from the ground, like a puppet whose strings have been pulled. She clutches at her throat and her feet swing helplessly in the air.

"Not so clever anymore, are you?" he spits darkly.

He moves her around, knocking her against glass and wall.

Bonnie's eyes smart with tears and she gazes at him without rancor. Only disbelief and…an appeal to what? His better nature?

He laughs, dismissively, but his jaws hurt and his frozen face shifts and his fingers twitch.

That's when he feels it.

He is no longer standing on solid ground. Before he can plant his feet down, he is up into the air. He is being raised to her level, inch by inch.

And suddenly, the strings fall. She stands before him perfectly still, gravity conquered and pushed aside. She is held up by her own magic, and she is a hellish, beautiful creature whose tears have dried on her cheek before she even speaks.

"Like I said. A leader is strong without his coven…but no match for a Bennett witch."

Kai struggles for breath and moves his limbs chaotically, but can't seem to fight her magic. Or, at least, hers seems to engulf his altogether.

 _Impossible._

"And especially, no match for a Bennett witch who uses Expression," she adds with a small, wicked smile and with a flick of her hand, he is knocked against the floor, up and down, twisting and writhing in her grasp, until he elicits a scream.

Kai groans, his voice haggard and awed, but drenched in a desperate need to break her. Perhaps, he should let himself be drawn…

He is on his knees, looking up at the deity towering over him.

"Kudos to you, Bon. You might be stronger. But I'm angrier."

He catapults himself at her and she flinches. He almost breaks through her powerful barrier. He falls down again, but Bonnie knows that when he launches himself again, he'll get through to her.

She gives him another string of aneurysms, fast and hot and heavy, and Kai's eyes turn red with lust and then white, as if possessed by another being.

And then, she shrieks. A guttural, primeval sound of fear.

Because the coven is waking up. The corpses rise slowly all around her. Their poor souls are forever trapped in the spirit world, but their pliant bodies wait for his command. She looks at their slack, barren faces and is gripped with utter terror.

"Well, look at that. I have an army of the dead." His teeth flash dangerously.

Bonnie knows she can't hold so many of them back. And she can't hover above them for much longer. She can only try to defeat as many as she can from her vantage point.

Fire pools into her palms. She begins her attack.

Kai laughs, dancing circles underneath her.

"That's right, Bon. Use up your resources. Make this easier for me."

Bonnie sees Liv Parker's dead eyes shift to her. She shudders. The curly-haired witch is going to strike. Bonnie feels real tears this time. She throws the ball of fire at the once living girl. It hurts. Like he wants it to.

She tries not to think of them as once-human. She has to protect herself at all costs. And the price is steep. Soon, flames and smoke engulf the greenhouse.

Kai's dark figure is outlined in ashes.

"Had enough?" he taunts, eyes glazed with satisfaction, red-rimmed by the fire.

"You're not going to kill me. You need me alive for your spell," she repeats, her insides growing cold.

"No," he agrees, "I'll just push you to the brink of death and always bring you back. How does that sound?"

Bonnie feels her body lowering itself to the ground. She has little time.

"Why are you doing this? Because I left you? All alone? Like you left me?"

Kai chuckles and wipes the soot from his forehead.

"Don't turn this around, Bonster. I didn't leave you with a bunch of blood-dispensers."

"No. It was worse, wasn't it? I had no one. Not even _you_ ," she says, looking directly into the flames echoed in his eyes.

Kai swallows angrily. "I'm sure my absence was sorely felt."

"We could've split the prison world in half, like I told you. We could've lived in peace. But you had to ruin it," she says, her voice filled with a foreign emotion she didn't know was lurking between the words.

 _Disappointment._

That's what she felt when he stabbed her, left her half-dead. Mounting disappointment. Squashed and forgotten, eventually, but now, returned twofold, because she has opened a door of possibility with her very words. And although she only wants to stall him, make him doubt, make him …feel something, this plan has been fraught from the beginning, because the door is opening wider and it's _not good_.

Kai's face is taut and drawn.

"Why couldn't we split _this world_? Why did it have to be the prison world?"

A king might still have his queen, even though defeat looms bright before victory.

Bonnie blinks. "You know why. In the real world all you ever wanted was vengeance."

Kai laughs a bitter, pungent laugh.

"You know I was an idiot and actually _tried?_ Tried to want something _else_? Tried to be -"

He falters, because these words don't come easy. They've been ripped from his vocabulary since the day his father called him an abomination.

"Good," she finishes for him.

Kai looks up. "Did it make a damn difference? No. I'm not out for vengeance, Bonnie. I'm just _out_. And I never plan on forcing myself to change again. This is what they made me. This is what I am. And I'm happy."

He delivers the last word in a playful, jarring note that speaks of infinite solitude. But he looks utterly confident and pleased with his new dominion.

A shadow flickers across her face. "Why did you even try, then?"

Kai clicks his tongue. The army of the dead staggers but remains alert, ready to pounce. Only a flimsy ring of fire separates her and Kai from the coven of corpses.

"It hardly matters when I'm about to -"

"You tried _for me_."

Bonnie's voice is a dim tremor, but he hears it and halts to a stop, fists clenched at his side.

"I know you cared about me. You still - still do."

Kai forces himself to laugh and tilts his head back. "You're _really_ going with this?"

"This whole grotesque display, the spell, Elena…it's all to punish me for not caring back."

A muscle in his face twitches. His jaws hurt. He grins, but he's barely holding it together.

"Right. Cuz I'd unleash all hell just to nurse a little crush. This isn't high school, Bon Bon."

"I know," she says, her feet now almost touching the ground. "And you don't have a crush on me."

She seems to stagger as she comes down. She thinks she'll fall. But her heart surges, because he's at her side in a second. Supporting her. She falls into his chest. She blinks and looks up at him, mystified.

His eyes are dark and unreadable. His face devoid of humor, devoid of sense. He has betrayed himself. And he resents _it_ , resents her and the very air between them. She feels his anger, the pent-up frustration of forty wasted years. But more than that, the innocent fury of a boy who's never been allowed to feel this deeply.

Neither of them knows how to continue.

He's holding his arms lightly around her and her fists are bunched up into his bloody shirt.

"Thanks," she says at length.

He wants to pull away, but her palms are cupped against his beating heart.

"You can't fool me again," he speaks harshly.

"Ditto," she replies.

Kai grabs her chin roughly, holding her face up to his.

" _I don't care about you_."

Bonnie smiles a broken smile. "Then - don't - care."

His eyes dart across her face in anguish. They swallow each other's breaths. Kai lets out a strangled moan. His hand is in her hair and the air between them is gone.

The kiss is ugly.

He storms her mouth, crushing his lips against hers with the frightened hatred of a yearning bigger than she could possibly imagine. She receives him with contempt and a sick sort of passion that grows and festers inside of her. Has grown and festered for a while. Her hands come up to his face, grip his head, like a medieval vise, trying to crush his brains. He pulls at the knots in her hair, his other hand on her neck, above the puncture of his fangs.

Teeth and spit and blood. The world whirls around them, careens on its axis as their tongues grow weary and yet seek ever more from each other. They pause, foreheads resting against each other, lips barely touching. Kai nips at her mouth. She kisses him softly.

The Expression will only allow her one try. Her hand becomes a blade. She knows this will only work once. And she issues a cry of regret.

Hand delves into his chest, grips his plump heart and - rips it out like a cord.

So easy, so gruesome. So little blood.

Kai blinks, eyes wide and clear. But she can read no surprise there. He falls into her arms.

She is lowered to the floor by his dead weight, but she doesn't mind. She embraces his remains, holds them close to her chest, afraid he'll disintegrate.

Kai looks up at her, only a few strains of magic left to keep him alive.

He raises his hand futilely to touch her face. It falls flat against his side.

He laughs a short, empty laugh. A laugh of no life lived. Not truly.

" _Naughty girl_."

Bonnie chokes. She blocks the memory. She wants to forget the last time he called her that. Wants to erase the affection in his voice. A strangled whimper scratches at her throat.

"You…were the first thing I saw. Now you'll be the - last," he croaks almost cheerfully.

She closes her eyes as tears spill freely down her cheeks. They land, one by one, on his tired, peaceful face. She is outside herself and she cannot contain this grief. Wouldn't know how to begin. She is brimming with warmth and heartache.

"Hey…" he mumbles, trying to keep his eyes open, "we'll always have nineteen-ninety-f…."

The four never comes.

Bonnie clutches his hand and holds it to her face. It's growing cold. She stifles a sob.

The fire has died down. The corpses are lifeless once more. She is queen over this death and her king has fallen at last.

She no longer stifles the sob. She cries, weeps and heaves. A flood of water bathes his closed eyes. Her cries echo across the debris, the destruction and chaos. It might be Stockholm's. It might be madness. Her captor has won. He's wormed his way inside of her, and she'll keep him there, until no one knows he's ever existed. But she'll know.

She'll know.

She bends down and kisses his forehead goodbye.


End file.
